JORGE MARTINEZ's "Poesy"

Craig Scott Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in April 2006 was a mini-retrospective of Jorge Martínez prints across a wide range of etching and engraving techniques, and printed using a range of inks and papers – alongside several paintings in varied media.

Entitled “Poesy”, the exhibition’s centerpiece was a series of eleven readings by Martínez of the work of the Greek-Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy. Reading Cavafy in Spanish, Jorge Martinez has translated into his distinctive neo-baroque art the following Cavafy poems:"Waiting for the Barbarians", "Walls", “The Windows", "The Ides of March" (in 2 different prints), “The God Abandons Anthony", "Ithaka", "Morning Sea", and One of Their Gods" In addition, Martinez has produced two works honouring Cavafy: "Kavafy, I", in its own way a printed poem; and "Constantino Kavafis, 1933", a marvellous portrait of the poet.

The April 2006 show also exhibited five works recently acquired (May 2005) by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and also introduced the North American art world to Martínez as a major painter. A series of magnificent oil and acrylic paintings were exhibited in frames that Martínez had specially made to be an integral part of the works. The works had been, until the exihibition, part of Martinez' personal collection.

The show coincided with the publication, in 2006, of a newly translated edition of all of Cavafy's published poems (and a selection of unpublished poems) by a major publisher: Cavafy, The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy (New York: WW Norton, 2006), trans. Aliki Barnstone. From the book jacket and the website of the publisher: "C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was born to Greek parents in Alexandria, Egypt, where he spent most of his life. He preferred to circulate his poems privately in broadsheets and pamphlets, which he gave to trusted friends. He withheld nearly a third of his work, including the most homoerotic, from the public eye. ...During his life, his friend E.M. Forster championed his work in the English-speaking world, introducing it to renowned modernists, among them D.H, Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, who published "Ithaka" in his journal, Criterion. Now Cavafy is revered as the most innovative and internationally influential Greek writer of the twentieth century, and one of the world's great poets.... Cavafy has written some of the most powerful poems in history. His work uncannily translates history, the record of the many, into an individual personal document. Though Cavafy is wickedly satirical, many of his poems are located in a landscape of intimacy. Drawing on the spectrum of ancient Greek poetic tradition, his poetry is still internal, whether his speaker is a spoiled rich boy who plans to enter politics or a poor, ostracized, pure and beautiful young man destroyed by poverty and priggish social mores."